Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB) is a family of standards for digital television applications. DVB includes both source coding (e.g., reduction of source data rate) and channel coding (e.g., improvement in transmission resiliency) methods for efficient and robust digital transmission of audiovisual information, for example, digital television. Different versions of DVB have been developed to address particular communication delivery modes. For example, DVB-S is designed for satellite broadcasting of digital TV, DVB-T is designed for terrestrial broadcasting of digital TV and DVB-C is designed for cable broadcasting of digital TV. A more recent version, digital video broadcasting-handheld (DVB-H), has been developed for mobile digital TV applications to handheld devices such as mobile telephones and personal digital assistants (PDAs).
All of the versions of DVB incorporate source coding based on the Moving Pictures Experts Group (MPEG) digital compression standards. Digital compression is a well-known digital signal processing method to reduce the source data rate by accounting for information redundancy and by coding mostly differential information, rather than only absolute information.
At any one time, multiple stream bursts of information (e.g., digital TV, file/data downloads, data multicast, etc.) may be received by a DVB-H receiver. Typically, the average channel switching time is half the time slice period which may be too long for typical user satisfaction. Although with additional memory DVB-H receivers can achieve faster channel switching, increasing the memory size in handheld receivers increases the cost and dc power consumption, which is in many instances is not acceptable for small battery-powered mobile devices.